The ice house was built with walls of hollow terracotta tile, a material often used in the Midwest for silos and barns. The building has a circular form (100 feet in diameter), and the 30-foot-high walls are capped by a wood roof and a small, centrally placed venting lantern. The present roof is recent and does not completely follow the original roof's double slope. The building was designed to store ice cut in the winter months from the nearby Cedar River for summer use. From 1938 to 1975 the building was used for boat storage, but now it has been converted into a museum displaying historic ice-cutting equipment.